Podcasts · Science · Society & Culture
Overheard at National Geographic
National Geographic
160 episodes
Come dive into one of the curiously delightful conversations overheard at National Geographic’s headquarters, as we follow explorers, photographers, and scientists to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. Hosted by Peter Gwin and Amy Briggs.
Episodes page 2 of 4
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Frank Drake’s Cosmic Road Map
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a question we’ve been asking for millennia. Now we’re on the cusp of learning the answer. Frank Drake—one of the most vocal (and brilliant) askers—has spent the past six decades…
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Playback: Amelia Earhart Part II: The Lady’s Legacy
Amelia Earhart’s statue was recently unveiled at the U.S. Capitol, and for good reason: Her adventurous spirit had implications for women around the country. Earhart went well beyond setting records as a pilot--her…
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Harnessing the Power of Yellowstone’s Supervolcano
If a major eruption ever were to occur at Yellowstone’s “supervolcano,” the event could destroy huge swaths of North America. But in recent years, some scientists have proposed that the amazing power locked beneath the…
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Stonehenge Has a Traffic Problem
The 4,500-year-old Stonehenge attracts hordes of tourists—and massive congestion. To alleviate traffic, the British government is considering a plan to build a tunnel near the monument, but historians and modern Druids…
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Do Shark Stories Help Sharks?
Our obsession with sharks has generated folklore around the world for thousands of years. But a series of attacks at the Jersey shore in 1916 would forever change the way we tell stories about sharks. We trace how…
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How Black Climbers Are Closing the Adventure Gap
Ever since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, there has been a long list of firsts: the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, the first in winter, and the first full ski descent,…
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Playback: The Tree At the End of the World
Deadly seas. Hurricane-force winds. A punishing journey to the tip of South America is all in a day’s work for Nat Geo Explorer Brian Buma. But Craig Welch, a reporter who calls himself a “normal human being,” also…
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She Shoots, She Scores: Title IX Turns 50
Meet Kari. Now meet the other Kari. One played college lacrosse in the 1980s; the other currently plays at the same school for the same coach. College sports have radically evolved during that time—take the high-tech…
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This Indigenous Practice Fights Fire with Fire
For decades, the U.S. government evangelized fire suppression, most famously through Smokey Bear’s wildfire prevention campaign. But as climate change continues to exacerbate wildfire seasons and a growing body of…
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Sonic Postcards From the Appian Way
“All roads lead to Rome” was once more than a saying; it was a fact. The first of the great roads of ancient Rome, the Appian Way was the most important of them all. Italians still travel what’s left of the Queen of…
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Restoring a Lost Sense of Touch
When Brandon Prestwood’s left hand was caught in an industrial conveyor belt 10 years ago, he lost his hand and forearm. Scientists are unraveling the science of touch by trying to tap into the human nervous system and…
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Where in the World Is Jessica Nabongo?
In 2019 Jessica Nabongo, author of the popular travel blog The Catch Me If You Can, became the first documented Black woman to travel to every country in the world. From swimming with humpback whales near Tonga to…
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Bringing the Dead to Life
Thousand-year-old Peruvian queens and medieval murder victims may seem lost to time, but history “detectives” are on a mission to solve a mystery: What did those people look like? We hear from Oscar Nilsson, a forensic…
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The Greening of Pittsburgh
When it comes to examples of cities that have successfully emerged from the industrial age into the information age, look no further than Pittsburgh. But can it be done with an eye toward climate solutions? In this…
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Going Undercover to Save Manta Rays
After wildlife filmmaker Malaika Vaz stumbled upon manta ray poaching near her home in India, she disguised herself as a fish trader to find out who was behind the plot—a dicey proposition as she pursues traffickers in…
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Farming for the Planet
How do you turn barren land into a complex working farm that reflects the planet’s biodiversity? Just ask John and Molly Chester, who traded city life in Los Angeles for 200 acres in Ventura County, where they are…
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The Secret Life of Plants
How do you capture the image of a 150-foot-tall tree in the middle of a dense rainforest? If you’re National Geographic Explorer Nirupa Rao, you pull out your paints. Rao draws from the centuries-old practice of…
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Solving the Mystery of the Boiling River
As a boy growing up in Peru, Andrés Ruzo recalls his grandfather’s stories about the horrors Spanish conquistadores encountered in the Amazon, including a “boiling river.” Years later, Ruzo, a National Geographic…
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Turning Old Cell Phones into Forest Guardians
What happens when a tree falls in a forest and no one is listening? The sound starts with truck engines and chainsaws and ends with a small piece of forest being silenced. Illegal logging is slowly thinning out the…
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Queens of the High Seas
Yo-ho, a pirate’s life for she! Legends of Blackbeard and movie buccaneers like Captain Jack Sparrow give us the impression that piracy was a man’s world. But historians and the Nat Geo book Pirate Queens: Dauntless…
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First Ascent of a Sky Island
In the most remote part of Guyana, plateaus called tepuis—also known as sky islands for poking through the clouds—rise up from the jungle. They’re topped by unique ecosystems, filled with plants and animals never…
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Nowruz and the Night Sky
Not everyone celebrates the New Year in the middle of winter; for 300 million people around the world, their New Year begins at the moment of the vernal equinox. The holiday of Nowruz celebrates that “new day” by…
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Amelia Earhart Part II: The Lady’s Legacy
Behind her modest smile and windblown charm, Amelia Earhart was a rarity in the 1930s: a fiercely confident woman with a dream to fly. Her adventurous spirit went well beyond setting records as a pilot—her true goal…
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Amelia Earhart Part I: The Lady Vanishes
Ever since Amelia Earhart made her last radio transmission somewhere over the Pacific, theories about her disappearance have proliferated; more than 80 years later, the constant retelling of her story shows no signs of…
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Playback: The Battle for the Soul of Artificial Intelligence
With every breakthrough, computer scientists are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). We see it in everything from predictive text to facial recognition to mapping disease incidence. But increasingly…
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Summiting the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain
K2, a mountain in the Kashmir region of Asia, is the second highest peak on Earth and yet more dangerous than Mount Everest, especially in the winter. But in January 2021, a group of Nepali climbers attempted to…
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The Wonders of Urban Wildlife
National Geographic Explorer Danielle Lee takes us on a tour of potential research sites around her home in the St. Louis area, sharing her passion for witnessing how wildlife (particularly rodents) thrives in…
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The Price of Adventure
Renowned mountaineer Alex Lowe had reached the summit of his career by 1999, scaling some of the planet’s most challenging peaks. Just a few months after he was featured in National Geographic as “one of the world’s…
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The Arctic Story Hunter
What’s it like to grow up underneath the aurora borealis, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean? Photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva describes leaving—and returning to—Tiksi, a Siberian coastal town that during her childhood…
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Resurrecting Notre-Dame de Paris
National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve documents the layered history and revival of one of the world’s most enduring landmarks, Notre-Dame de Paris. A reflection of the city and part of its soul, the…
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Capturing the Year in an Instant
We’ll sift through 2021 with Whitney Johnson, National Geographic’s director of visuals and immersive experiences, as she works on the “Year in Pictures” special issue and shares what makes an unforgettable image. And…
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Descendants of Cahokia
How did people create Cahokia, an ancient American Indian metropolis near present-day St. Louis? And why did they abandon it? Archaeologists are piecing together the answers—but Cahokia’s story isn’t finished yet. Hear…
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Kenya's Wildlife Warriors
In the heart of the Serengeti, hippos bathe and hyenas snatch food from hungry lions. National Geographic Explorer of the Year Paula Kahumbu brings this world to life in her documentary series Wildlife Warriors, a…
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The Gateway to Secret Underwater Worlds
When Jacques Cousteau was young, an accident sent him on a path that led him to invent scuba, opening up the underwater world to humans. Today, explorers David Doubilet and Laurent Ballesta follow in his footsteps,…
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Ancient Orchestra
Sound on! From conch shells to bone flutes, humans have been making musical instruments for tens of thousands of years. What did prehistoric music sound like? Follow us on a journey to find the oldest musical…
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When Family Secrets (And Soap Operas) Fuel Creativity
National Geographic photographer Diana Markosian tells us about her remarkable childhood and how her career as a photographer led her into the war in Chechnya—and eventually to her long-lost father’s doorstep in…
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Modern Lives, Ancient Caves
There's a lost continent waiting to be explored, and it’s right below our feet. We’ll dig into the deep, human relationship to the underground, and why we understand it from an instinctive point of view — but not so…
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A Skeptic's Guide to Loving Bats
Blood-sucking villains. Spooky specters of the night. Our views of bats are often based more on fiction than fact. Enter National Geographic Explorer at Large Rodrigo Medellín, aka the Bat Man of Mexico. For decades…
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Playback: If These Walls Could Talk
Social media is not just for modern folk. In this episode from the Overheard archives, we’ll look at how in ancient Pompeii, people also shared what they thought, who they met with, what they ate—just with different…
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Playback: The Frozen Zoo
San Diego is home to the world’s first frozen zoo—a genetic library where scientists are racing to bank the tissues and stem cells of disappearing animals. As scientists begin to clone endangered species, we revisit an…
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The Guerrilla Cyclists of Mexico City
Tired of waiting for the local government to build more bike lanes, a group of cyclists in Mexico City, the largest city in North America, took matters into their own hands: they painted the lanes themselves.. As…
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Venturing into the Heart of Manila
While growing up, Hannah Reyes Morales wasn’t allowed to venture out into the rough streets of Manila, but later her work as a photographer would take her there. In the city’s dark corners, she shed light on the…
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Joel Sartore Wants to Save the Creepy-Crawlies
Joel Sartore has been called a modern Noah for his work on the Photo Ark, a photography project with a simple mission: Get people to care that we could lose half of all species by the turn of the next century. He…
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Portraits of Afghanistan Before the Fall
Twenty years since the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban have once again seized power of the country. In the months leading up to the fall of the nation’s capital, National Geographic…
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Lucy in the Sky With Asteroids
How did the planets form? How did life happen? Where did Earth’s water come from? To answer questions like these, scientists used to go big—looking at planets, dwarf planets, and moons—but now small is the new big.…
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Cracking Down on Cheetah Traffickers
Cheetahs are in trouble. With just 7,000 left in the wild in Africa, populations have been in a continuous decline due to trophy hunting, habitat loss, retaliatory killings, and dealers looking to sell them to the…
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The Aztec: From Empire to AI
August 1521: Spain’s victory over the Aztec launches colonization of Mexico, but Aztec culture will survive for centuries through preservation and practice. Aztec codices—16th-century Rosetta Stones that preserved…
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Cooling Cities By Throwing Shade
Trees provide much-needed shade for urban Americans on a hot day, but not everyone gets to enjoy it. New research illuminates how decades of U.S. housing policy created cities where prosperous, white neighborhoods are…
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Dive Deeper: Season 7 of Overheard
Exploring the superpowers of sharks. Building shade for warming cities. Remapping the solar system. Investigating illegal cheetah trafficking. Join us for curiously delightful conversations, overheard at National…
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Playback: The Glass Stratosphere
As billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson lead the charge for a new commercial space race, we revisit an episode from our archives: What if women had been among the first to head to the moon? A NASA physician…
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